Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

Published 1 January 1920
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

Both a witty satire of literary cliché and a tender meditation on the varieties of love, As You Like It continues to be one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and widely performed comedies. In the introduction to this new edition, David Bevington traces the complex relationships between the characters in the play, and explores the history of its criticism from Samuel Johnson to the twenty-first century.

As part of the newly launched Broadview Press / Internet Shakespeare Editions series, this edition features a variety of interleaved materials—from facsimile pages, diagrams, and musical scores to illustrations and extended discussions of myth and folklore—that provide a context for the social and cultural allusions in the play. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare’s key sources and influences, including Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor.

A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.